JULY 12 — Political satires are nothing new in Hollywood cinema. As early as 1933 there were classics like Duck Soup and oddities like Gabriel Over The White House taking potshots at the world of politics, and taking them nicely too. Finding this kind of films in film cultures outside Hollywood and Europe is, however, an altogether different matter.

I know I wrote about Bollywood films just last week but at the time I hadn’t seen this strange little film called Revolver Rani. Now that I have, I simply have to write about it. 

Not having seen every single Bollywood film out there, I’m pretty sure there are quite a few Bollywood political satires in existence before. Off the top of my head, I can already think of Peepli Live as an example. But my gut feeling tells me never before has something as blatantly sarcastic and venomous as Revolver Rani ever raised its head in Bollywood cinema before.

My reason for feeling this? Well, political satires are usually the domain of the sober and serious, even in Hollywood. Even when they go into the realm of comedy like in Wag The Dog or The Campaign, they usually don’t have that “masala film” feel of Hindi cinema, with the exception of the films by the South Park boys — South Park The Movie and Team America: World Police — which are all-out musicals. 

While not quite up to the brilliance of these two films, Revolver Rani sort of reminds me of them in its devil-may-care attitude when it comes to making fun of everything, but those unfamiliar with Indian history and politics may have to read up a bit to catch everything.

Set in Chambal Valley, infamous for being the home of the dacoits (professional bandits for whom murder and robbery are as much a tradition as a way of life) the film follows the life of its heroine, Alka Singh, the Revolver Rani of the title, who has just lost an election to a rival politician. This being Chambal, guns are fired indiscriminately, even at political rallies, and one of the many chuckles you’ll get here is seeing how big of a “rock star” Alka is for her gun-toting abilities.

More jabs come in the form of the exaggeratedly trigger happy henchmen for Alka’s rival Udaybhan Tomar, hungry for revenge for Alka’s killing of one of their brothers. Come to think of it, everything in this film is exaggerated, probably so that people can distinguish it from the already exaggerated normal Bollywood films. Not only is it a satire on Chambal politics, it is also a satire on Bollywood cinema itself, but still taking the form of a Bollywood film, complete with singing and dancing.

Along the way, the film makes fun of everything. Nothing is sacred. Not even religion. Alka’s love interest is a wannabe Bollywood star named Rohan Mehra, and it’s this one-sided love affair that leads to what I think is one of the film’s funniest satirical jabs in which their secret marriage is covered up by Alka’s uncle (and political strategist) in a series of bad decisions and further cover-ups that include the marriage of a Hindu man to a Muslim girl according to Hindu traditions, then the conversion of that Hindu man to Islam after public outrage and finally another marriage according to Muslim traditions.

In the movie Revolver Rani, the leading character Alka Singh's one-sided love affair with a wannabe movie star leads to what the columnist thinks is one of the film’s funniest satirical jabs in which their secret marriage is covered up by Alka’s uncle in a series of bad decisions. — AFP pic

I may have laughed out loud at all this marriage merry-go-round thing, but it’s played with a really straight face by everyone (probably to avoid being accused of making fun of religion, still a very sensitive issue in India), so straight that if you’re not familiar with the issue you’d probably miss the joke. Straight faced jokes like this are everywhere in the film, like witnessing politicians and their goons shooting at each other at a public rally, which will probably not seem like a joke if you’re unfamiliar with the realities of life in Chambal Valley.

In short, the film doesn’t do much winking at the audience, despite its very sarcastic nature. It just spits out its venom wherever and whenever it wants and trusts the audience to know when it does. Even more refreshingly, it does all this with a clear love and respect for the forms and traditions of a Bollywood film, as can be heard in its songs, which are even sung by legendary playback singers like Asha Bosle and Usha Uthup, whose voices we haven’t heard in quite a while.

It may not be a perfect film, but its ambitions alone merit a viewing because films like these are not made every day, especially not in Bollywood. If only we can make something like this here in Malaysia!

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.